Between reality & style

Carlo Carrà's three seasons on display in Rome's new gallery

A little house as a side wing, a small pine tree, a barren ridge with the dark mouth of a cave, and the slate grey sea outlining a boundless horizon. These "four words of painting" define Pine by the Sea, the work by which Carlo Carrà would understand, in his own words, "clearly what I could ask of nature and take from it."
In 1921, at 40 years of age, Carrà came to discover this streamlined style, summarizing shapes and colours in the order of rigidly geometrical constructions that would accompany him for another half century. This style was incredibly consistent in its establishment of an idea of painting as "plastic order," and found in landscapes its ideal frame of expression and in seascapes a crowning achievement.
From 1926 onwards, after he discovered Forte dei Marmi and the sweet melancholy of the Tuscan coast, those seascapes would become the absolute protagonists of Carrà's art. They would become almost a paradigm of an artist who contemplates Nature, tames it (toning down the strong feelings it raises, through essential shapes and colours), and turns it into "a poem full of space and dream," capturing the relationship between "the need of identification with things and the need of abstraction."
Seascape with Lighthouse, painted in 1962, is particularly representative of this artistic quest, with its immovable horizontal architectures re-establishing a balance broken by the vertical lighthouse and leading to the white sail on the right, as if it contained the mystery of the sea, its being infinite and at the same time in constant transformation.
This painting, with some 60 other artworks by the same author, is on display in an exhibition entitled Omaggio a Carrà ("A Tribute to Carrà"), which opens a new gallery in Rome, Studio d'Arte Campaiola. This is Rome's largest exhibition venue (800 square metres) and it harbours the ambitious objective of becoming a reference for artistic life in Rome. Owner Giuseppe Campaiola (one of Rome's most renowned gallery owners since the mid-Sixties, and a friend of Renato Guttuso, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, and Alberto Moravia) could hardly choose a better subject as the first in a series of anthological exhibitions devoted to the great artists of the 20th century.
Carrà's paintings on display include landscapes he painted after World War II (such as Paesaggio, Paesaggio con Barca, and Alba Tragica), as well as still lives he painted in his maturity and to the very last, one month before he passed on in April 1966.
These paintings and drawings outline a rigorous creative path: the study of how spaces and volumes could be alternated in order to keep the "sentimental thrill" of reality in check. This study is a constant in his work, from his bold Futuristic beginnings to his landscape painting "ripened in intimate and solitary reflection," always going against the tide of art movements.
This moral loneliness had actually been chosen by Carrà even before then: in 1922, after returning from an exhibition in Berlin where he had been hailed as the foremost representative of Magic Realism, the movement created around the magazine Valori Plastici ("Plastic Values") with Morandi, Casorati, and De Chirico among others. He took a definite decision "not to proceed alongside anyone else, being just myself."
That was the starting point of a solo adventure, rediscovering nature as the "raiser of panting relations that must be examined in terms of rhythmic shapes, colours, lights, in an harmonic construction of spatial and architectural values."
The only spiritual guides he followed in this endeavour were four masters of Italian art from the 14th and 15th centuries: beloved Giotto, his heir Masaccio, Paolo Uccello (the most Surrealist among Renaissance painters), and Piero della Francesca. It was because of Carrà's interpretation of their works that led him to break away from Futurism, despite having been one of its founders following Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's publication of the Futurist Manifesto in 1909.

Publication Date: 2001-12-09
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=693